Seven-part installation environment. Live camera feed, video projection, kinetic sculpture, preserved specimens, encaustic wax, animal bones, dried foliage, metal mesh, micro-motors, digital microscope, acrylic, beeswax, damar gum, encaustic pigments. Dimensions variable. Exhibited at Mesa Community College Gallery, San Diego (2024) and MSU Museum CoLab Studio, East Lansing, Michigan (2026). Horizon, from this series, is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Dark Loops — full exhibition documentation
The Story Behind the Work
Dark Loops began as a research question: how do you make ecological anxiety felt rather than explained? Two texts drove the inquiry — Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology and Giovanni Aloi’s Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene — both grappling with how ecological collapse is represented and felt. I spent months testing materials, objects, and camera configurations to find a visual and conceptual response rather than an illustration.
Horizon emerged from that process — a fish tank, lava rocks, and a balloon discovered through experimentation to produce a live-feed projected sunset indistinguishable from the real thing. The apparatus stayed visible. The illusion held anyway. That gap — between what produces the image and what the image does — became the methodology for the entire series.
Horizon, 2024 — still image
Each of the live feed works transforms a real physical object through camera and projection: a preserved bee filmed through a digital microscope becomes a living creature on screen; a fire pit and driftwood become a moth’s pyre; a Cholla wood snake puppet stitched from balloons becomes a creature in motion. In each work, the physical apparatus stays visible beside the image it produces. Two realities occupy the same space simultaneously, neither canceling the other.
Three works — Carousel, Chrysalums, and Wax and Bones — step outside the live feed methodology: kinetic, suspended, and sculptural. They extend the same inquiry into pure physical form: what does ecological loss look and feel like when technology is removed from the equation?
Carousel, 2024 — still image
The work is driven by what I see as a single problem wearing two faces: technological desire and ecological anxiety. I don’t resolve that tension — I inhabit it. Dark Loops is the most complete expression of that methodology so far — rooted in eighteen years of teaching in San Diego public schools, where ecological anxiety and technological desire aren’t abstract concepts but daily realities my students and I navigate together.
The Seven Works
Horizon, 2024
Live camera feed, video projection, webcam, acrylic, water, fish tank, pc computer, assorted hardware/lighting, water pumps, lava gravel, balloon. Dimensions variable.
A fish tank and a balloon become a live-feed projected sunset indistinguishable from the real thing. The apparatus stays visible beside the landscape it produces.
Infinite Bee, 2024
Live camera feed, video projection, digital microscope, preserved bee, artificial turf, ceramic tea cup, motor. Dimensions variable.
A dead bee filmed through a microscope becomes a living creature projected life-size on screen. The specimen sits beside its own resurrection.
Elegy for Moths, 2024
Live camera feed, video projection, webcam, fire pit, pc computer, assorted hardware/lighting, acrylic, fish bones, driftwood, motors. Dimensions variable.
A fire pit and driftwood become a moth’s pyre — material and projected image holding grief and ecological loss in the same space.
New Eden, 2024
Live camera feed, video projection, webcam, pet cage, pc computer, assorted hardware/lighting, motors, acrylic, Cholla wood, rattlesnake tail, artificial plants. Dimensions variable.
A constructed snake puppet becomes a creature in motion on screen. The tail moves. The apparatus stays visible.
Carousel, 2024
Motorized rotisserie, chicken wire powder-coated black with silver glitter, preserved beetles. Dimensions variable.
A motorized rotisserie wound with black wire, glitter, and preserved beetles. It turns. Kinetic sculpture as evidence of ecological collection, preservation, and display.
Chrysalums, 2024
Mexican butterfly vines, metal cages, encaustic wax, fishing line, floor fan. Dimensions variable.
Suspended, kinetic, organic. A floor fan moves them.
Wax and Bones, 2024
Artificial greenery, dried foliage, damar gum, beeswax, encaustic pigments, preserved bees, preserved fish and animal bones, powder-coated metal grids. Dimensions variable.
No technology. Organic matter held in wax — preserved insects, animal bones, dried foliage — grieved over as much as observed. A sculptural series working with material alone, where the ecological anxiety at the center of Dark Loops takes purely physical form.
View the full Wax and Bones sculptural series
Research & Influences
The conceptual foundation of Dark Loops draws from two key texts: Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology (2016), which proposes that ecological awareness requires sitting with darkness, uncertainty, and non-resolution rather than offering redemptive narratives; and Giovanni Aloi’s Speculative Taxidermy (2018), which examines how animal specimens are used in contemporary art to hold ecological anxiety and loss. Both texts shaped the core question: how do you make ecological collapse felt in the body of a viewer rather than understood in the mind?
About the Artist
Margaret Noble builds installations from salvaged materials, sound, and projected light. Recent solo projects include Drift, made during her residency at the Timken Museum of Art, and Dark Loops at the MSU Museum. Her sound sculpture Clamor Machine was created for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in New York, and earlier residencies include the Museum of Applied and Contemporary Art, Vienna. Her public art has been commissioned by the San Diego International Airport and BART in Berkeley, and her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the City of San Diego’s civic art collection. Noble holds an MFA in Sound Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. Noble has taught art in San Diego public schools for eighteen years.